A berry big mistake

An embarrassed European Parliament confessed on Thursday (7 April) that MEPs were not, after all, victims of a “calculated and co-ordinated” cyber attack by sinister intruders at the end of March.

Experts had initially thought that the increased activity was linked to attacks on the European Commission and the European External Action Service the week before, aimed at “snooping around” to get access to sensitive Parliamentary data.

The Parliament’s technical support unit told MEPs and staff that what they had suspected was an attack on the webmail system was just a mass email synchronisation problem related to the use of BlackBerry devices.

“It appears that the security of Parliament’s systems was not compromised,” said a notice circulated by the technical experts. One official said the webmail service “was not equipped” to handle the BlackBerry devices, which resulted in a flood of activity when they automatically updated between 3am and 6am during the last week of March. It would appear that cyber criminals are less interested in MEPs than the Parliament’s IT staff would like to think.